Could one imagine a more difficult task, amongst all the manifold problems which have confronted us in this war, than the expansion of the framework of our little Expeditionary Force to embrace these hundreds of thousands of men, from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, from India and Canada, from South Africa and Australia, from Fiji and the West Indies, with their varying ideas of personal liberty and discipline? That this task has been successfully accomplished is due, for one thing, to the fact that every man in our army is an apostle, bearing within him a message of liberty to the world, ready to subordinate every personal feeling to the end of victory; for another, to the astonishing adaptability of our race, which has enabled Lord Kitchener to stamp an army from the earth, and Sir John French and his Generals to breathe into it the spirit of our great military past.
If you took a small haberdasher in a London suburb and suddenly increased his modest establishment until it reached the dimensions of William Whiteley’s or of Harrod’s, would you blame the man if, even with unlimited resources, he showed himself incapable of achieving the same relative measure of success as he had attained with his little shop? You know that you would not. You would rather blame the lack of organization that had suddenly thrust enormously increased responsibilities on a man who, had the process been gradual, might have adapted himself to the growing dimensions of his business. Yet this is what the country has thrust upon Sir John French. He, a General, like all save the Balkan and Turkish Generals, without any experience of modern European war, has been called upon to meet in unequal combat the finest military brains that the application of forty years can produce, with a sword that has constantly changed its weight and balance and length and sharpness.
He has sustained the ordeal. His adaptability of temperament and breadth of outlook, for which all Britons may thank God, has enabled him to cope with an army ten times the size of the little force which he originally led out to France, and to surround himself with Generals who have shown themselves able to handle divisions where before they were dealing with battalions. Not only have the numbers of our army increased; the quality of our men has changed. The sturdy fighters of Mons and the Marne have been reinforced by Territorials who are, generally speaking, of a higher stamp of intelligence, and accordingly endowed with the good and bad fighting qualities which the more trained intellect bestows, and the men of the New Army, in which all types and classes of Briton are found side by side in the ranks. Not only has the question of the right leading of these new formations proved all-important, the problem of their assimilation into the existing organization was one requiring tact and a fine appreciation of the Imponderabilia of the situation. That it has been successfully solved History, when it comes to review the world-shaking events of our days, beside which man seems but the puniest of pygmies, cannot fail to count to the merit of Sir John French.
To our citizen army, then, Sir John French is more than a Commander-in-Chief. He is a national leader, the man to whom it is given to direct that fount of ardent patriotism which has inspired Britons, wherever the Union Jack flies, to lay down their work and follow the drum. No man is more conscious of the responsibility resting on his shoulders than Sir John French. No man is more profoundly convinced of the justice of our cause. No man could appreciate more gratefully the immense confidence which the nation has reposed in him by entrusting to his care the greatest army that the British Empire has ever put in the field.
CHAPTER IX
INTO THE FIRING-LINE
I never come upon the firing-line without a sense of surprise. Upon eye and imagination alike it breaks with a sudden shock. You emerge from a long communication trench, driven right through all obstacles, now across a deserted highway with a vista of grass-grown cobbles stretching away on either hand; now straight through the vitals of a stricken farm, where the head is on a level with a floor littered with rubbish, discarded equipment, rags, or empty ration-tins; through the silent basse cour with its empty chicken-run, its deserted pigeon-coop, its barns gaunt and blasted, its forlorn carts and rusting machinery; through cornfields waist-high in a self-sown crop gay with poppies and cornflowers.
Up these trenches, you may reflect as you trudge along with what one might call a rabbit’s-eye view on either side, reliefs and rations go up at dark, long files of silent men plodding through the summer night with the frogs croaking in the marshes and the night-jars creaking in the trees. Down these trenches come the men who have done their spell of duty in the firing-line, muddy and unshaven and laden with all kinds of personal belongings from a month-old copy of the Sketch to a German cooking-pot, silently delighted at the prospect of a few days’ respite from trench mortars and “whizz-bangs” and bullets and vermin. Here, when fighting is toward, there is a crush in the Strand on a Saturday night. In one direction go the men bearing boxes of bombs and ammunition swiftly forward to the firing-line, squeezing themselves back against the muddy walls on the cry of “Gangway there!” to let orderlies with messages past; in the other direction the wounded, roughly bandaged, make their painful way back to the regimental aid-post or field ambulance. The shells come crashing over in and around the trench, and the bullets from the front line snap and whinny and whistle in the air as though to proclaim to all men still alive that their mission is not yet accomplished. But a little rain, and these trenches become first quagmires of mud, the sticky whitish clay of Flanders, of which our men speak with horror, or the browner soil of France, then stagnant ponds, knee or even waist deep, in which men, walking alone and struck down by shell or bullet, have been known to drown before help could reach them.
But sombre thoughts have no place in the communication trenches. The men you meet, passing up and down, are smiling. The Adjutant, descending with mud-covered boots and puttees, his stout broomstick in his hand, from his morning walk round his battalion’s section of the line, gives you a cheery “Good-day!” after the etiquette of officers when they meet out here. A working party, laden with spades and saws and beams, who are marching in Indian file ahead of you, are joking as they plod. One of them has a mouth-organ, and is softly playing a little music-hall jingle as he walks:
“I’d like to be, I’d like to be,
I’d like to be right home in Dixie....”
As, with a whistling “whoosh,” a shell comes over from the deep blue sky ahead, the music stops, the party stops, and the men, turning with a common movement, crane their heads out of the trench to see where the shell has fallen. Boom! ... the report comes back, and a cloud of dense black smoke eddies out above a clump of trees. “My word!” says the sergeant, “the brigade’s catching it to-day and no mistake!” Then the party trudges on again down the trench, while the crickets chirp noisily in the corn, and the musician resumes his little tune: